On 1/8/06, Sam Spade samspade.thomasjefferson@googlemail.com wrote:
We agree about harmful or threatening talk page content, altho where do we draw the line? I find communism and satanism threatening myself...
It's not the espousal of views that is problematic. Saying you're a communist or a satanist on your user page is fine with me (even a proponent of global warfare in the interests of one's country, there are plenty of them around). It's the factionalization, achieved by the use of cateogories and possibly (though I'm not entirely convinced on this) through the "whatlinkshere" mechanism, that is the problem in my view.
We should never think things like :
"these clueless newbies and their dumb ideas are a real bother to us admins. Lets delete their user boxes and give them a serious scolding! Then maybe they'll go away and us admins won't have so much work to do"
I can see your concerns, but I'm not really convinced here. I see it as possibly quite a large number new people who have no interest in the project and would probably be happier elsewhere. While the evidence here is at present somewhat anecdotal, and we should proceed with caution, I want to do more investigation on this to see just how much inclination these new users have shown to get down to working on the encyclopedia rather than their user pages.